AWS Summit KL 2015

On the 21st of May, the first AWS Summit was held at Connexion@Nexus,
located in Kuala Lumpur. A total of 1075 participants turned up that day
which lasted from 7.30am till 6pm.

The summit was split into two tracks. The first track is Introduction to
AWS while the second track is AWS Architecture. There were also
exhibition booths ran by sponsors of the event. A good part of the
exhibition was aimed at companies thinking about converting their system
to the cloud.

The keynote introduced a new AWS feature called AWS Lambda, which was
the core of several keynotes during the day. Other AWS components were
re-introduced and have their uses featured in several applications. The
keynotes in the advanced track mostly feature big data analytics while
the introduction track introduces the audience to the various services
that AWS has. There is also a dedicated talk about container computing,
mostly referencing to Docker.

AWS Lambda features a serverless and stateless web app. All you need are
functions and make use of S3 and DynamoDB without the need to set up
your own infrastructure. Charges will occur every 100ms the process is
running after the free monthly quota is used up.

Other services which were highlighted was AWS Machine Learning for
analyzing data trends and predicting outcomes based on the data fed, AWS
Kinesis for live streaming data, AWS Redshift is another kind of
database which is used in big data analytics. Also featured was the
elastic file system, or AWS EFS as well as AWS EMR, which is the
equivalent of the Hadoop cluster.

The day ended with a lucky draw session contributed by the sponsors as
well as from AWS themselves.

In conclusion, it was a fun and informative day for all who attended.
The excitement of Lambda still echoed in various conversations long
after the morning keynote and demo was addressed. There is also a
growing support of local services to help other companies migrate to the
cloud. This year's summit seems to be the first step for many Malaysian
companies. But by next year's summit we're definitely going to see even
more creative use out of AWS as more and more people will be exposed and
using it.

Abdul Rahman Ibrahim

Engineer

Joined August 2014. Previously from the VFX industry and worked on Hollywood movies. Utilized Python, Perl and various other proprietary scripts to design, arrange and maintain the production pipeline which heavily involves automating workflows, data conversion, process scheduling and machine rendering management in a Linux environment.